Posted by Judy in Body-Mind
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If you “collect” change processes, listen up! I’ve just uploaded a video demonstration of Clean Space – one of the most powerful processes around.
When I need the “big guns” – to help my clients change several things at once, or perhaps to sort out for themselves how to handle a bind – this is frequently my technique of choice.
The late David Grove, creator of Clean Language, devised Clean Space to help his therapy clients to make dramatic breakthroughs. He felt it helped them to “nail their history to the floor” so that they could move without it, enabling them to free up their thinking and come up with new insights.
Some people feel this process has similarities with various spatial anchoring processes from NLP, such as Robert Dilts’ SCORE model. However, others take the view that this process has some striking differences from NLP.
Indeed the (possibly apocryphal) story goes that when Dilts was facilitated through SCORE by someone trained in Clean Space, he didn’t put the spaces in that order, or in a line… but More >
Posted by Judy in Body-Mind
If you’re interested in people, how they think, and how metaphor is involved, you’ll probably be curious about two links I was sent this week.
First up is a TED talk in which Prof Neil Burgess (of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London) explains how the brain figures out where you are – or where Homer Simpson parked his car. It’s fascinating!
Secondly, and perhaps even more exciting for metaphor enthusiasts like me, is new research that shows how metaphors are processed in the brain. It used to be assumed that when someone heard a metaphor, it was somehow “decoded” in the “language areas” of the brain (such as Broca’s or Wernicke’s areas) in order to be understood.
In the last 30 years or so most cognitive linguists – and Clean Language enthusiasts – have become convinced that metaphor goes much deeper than that. There are metaphors in language because there is metaphor in thought, at the most profound level.
This new research from Emory University in the USA seems to me to support that idea, by making it clear that when someone hears a metaphor relating to texture (“I’ve had a rough day”) it’s the areas of the brain relating to More >
Posted by Judy in Body-Mind
I’ve been writing recently about the relationship between two subjects I’m passionate about – David Grove’s Clean processes, and embodied cognition. There seem to me to be two key connections:
- Clean Language provides an effective methodology for noticing and exploring people’s unique and individual metaphors of movement and space, which often results in dramatic and transformative change (in coaching, changework and therapy)
- In the last ten years of his life, David devised a variety of changework processes which explicitly use space and movement: Clean Space, Emergent Knowledge and the Power of Six.
So, what are these later processes? There’s a neat description of Clean Space here.
As Penny Tompkins and James Lawley point out, “The basic Clean Space process is remarkably straightforward. There is a starting process, three simple routines which are repeated over and over, and a finishing process. Facilitating Clean Space requires only six questions and four directing statements.”
It also requires some courage on the part of the facilitator… because your client is going to get up out of their chair and move about. OMG!
I’ve taught this process to dozens of coaches over the years, and nearly all agree it’s one of the move effective they’ve ever experienced for themselves. However, very few More >
Posted by Judy in Body-Mind
What’s the relationship between metaphors of movement and Clean Language?
One connection is the way in which time and space are linked – through metaphor.
It’s almost impossible to talk about time except in spatial metaphors. Time flies. Days drag by. Diaries are packed or empty.
Wherever there’s space, there’s almost always movement – or stillness.
Apparently, even basic temporal terms like “then” or “when” have etymologies rooted in space and movement – those words come from a Germanic word meaning “from that place” according to James Geary in his excellent book on metaphor, I Is An Other.
Geary adds: “Brain scans show that when we think about time, the regions devoted to motion and spatial relationships are active as well.”
Exploring people’s metaphors for time can provide you – and them – with insights into why they do what they do.
When people think about time, they typically put it in specific places. And the places they choose are their own.
NLP enthusiasts will be familiar with the notion of the “timeline” – commonly in the West the past is behind and/or to the left, the future in front and/or to the right. But not everybody has a line – and of those that do, everyone’s is different.
I’ve More >
Posted by Judy in Body-Mind
I’ve posted often about the relationship between our bodies and our thoughts. You are not a disembodied mind or brain or personality who happens to inhabit a physical body – you are a whole person, and your body is essential to the way you think.
And I’ve recently been asked by several people, “What’s the relationship between all of that and Clean Language?” (What is Clean Language?)
One connection is that the late David Grove, creator of Clean Language, was fascinated by the role of space and movement in thought, and by the way people used metaphors – often unconsciously – to connect things.
His later work was all about space and movement. First came a process called Clean Space… then something called Emergent Knowledge… then another set of processes which have been called the Powers of Six, which he was still working on when he died in early 2009.
Each of these therapeutic processes involved moving the client physically, either on the therapist’s instructions or actually strapped into a device called a whirlygig, operated by the therapist and an assistant. (Read about my experience of this here)
Even within his Clean Language period, David was very into space and movement, and embodied metaphor.
He used the Clean More >
